"Towards a gated community" - bordering of immigra

beatriz

FROM: EUROZINE
Towards a gated community
Henk van Houtum
Roos Pijpers

Fear of (mass) migration has been and still is an important aspect of ongoing processes of socio-spatial bordering of immigrants within the European Union. The recent EU-enlargement involving several post-Soviet nations has only but intensified these sentiments. Offering an alternative to the well-known, yet flawed Fortress Europe metaphor, Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers argue that that the moral panic on immigration and consequent migration policy in various member states of the European Union follows a geo-strategic logic which much more than a Fortress resembles the management of a Gated Community.
(...)
In the present case, it could be argued, that the pressing and even disciplining discourse on the need to communify - expressed in terms like "common market", "internal market", "a borderless Europe" and "the need for European citizenship" - has invoked a certain state of "abnormality", portrayed by people living outside the EU and non-EU refugees seeking shelter inside the Union. The consequence is an increased anxiety and fear of the Other, or in the words of Sibley a moral panic, which in his view concern contested spaces, liminal zones which hostile communities intend on eliminating by appropriating such spaces for themselves and excluding the offending "other" (Sibley, 1995, p. 39). (...)

Find this article: http://www.eurozine.com/article/2005-01-12-houtumpijpers-en.html